alias: whole
In our era… the word ‘feeling’ has been contaminated. It is confused with emotions — with feelings (in the plural) such as wonder, sadness, anger — which confuse rather than help because they make us ask ourselves, which kind of feeling should I follow [when building]? The feeling I am talking about is unitary. It is feeling in the singular, which comes from the whole. It arises in us, but it originates in the wholeness which is actually there. The process of respecting and extending and creating the whole, and the process of using feeling, are one and the same. Real feeling, true feeling, is the experience of the whole.
When you build a thing you cannot merely bu9ild that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and wthin it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
A generating system… is a kit of parts, with rules about the way these parts may be combined. Almost every ‘system as a whole’ is generated by a ‘generating system’. If we wish to make things which function as ‘wholes’ we shall have to invent generating systems to create them.
– Christopher Alexander, 1968, “Systems Generating Systems”